Oracle has revealed two new servers using the NVM Express standard that does away with SAS/SATA controllers in ways the company says makes them perform very, very, well when stocked full of flash.
The basics: the two new beasts are called the X5-2 and the X5-2L. Both are two-socket affairs and use Intel's Xeon E5-2600 v3 silicon …

WD is demonstrating a faster-than-Seagate 4TB hybrid flash/disk drive at Storage Visions 2015.
It is built with 3.5-inch disk drive, an up to 128GB SSD, and the SATA Express PCIe interface with the flash and disk components presented as a single volume.
The demos include commercially available ASRock and Gigabyte motherboards …

Toshiba has joined Seagate and WD/HGST in the 6TB disk drive club, still so exclusive that it only has three members.
The MG04, with capacities of 2, 4, 5 and 6TB, spins at 7200rpm, making it a nearline drive. Toshiba claims it is good for 24/7 usage.
It has 12Gbit/s SAS or 6GBit/s SATA interfaces and a secure instant erase …

Seagate is building hard disk drives with a direct Ethernet interface and object-style API access for scalable object stores, a plan which - if it works - would destroy much of the existing, typical storage stack.
Drives would become native key/value stores that manage their own space mapping with accessing applications simply …

WD will demo PCIe-connected disk drives at the Computex tech conference in Taipei, using a SATA Express interface.
SATA Express has been enabled with partners, and is offered on Intel series-9 chipset motherboards. WD says it provides a route to faster speeds and lower power consumption. SATA revision 3.2 delivers 16Gbit/s. PCIe …

A NetApp pitch at the Flash Memory Summit said the cost-per-GB price trends for cheap TLC flash mean it will dip below SAS disks in 2017.
TLC is triple-level cell flash which holds three bits per cell, half as much again as the standard 2-bit or MLC NAND that is used in SSDs and server flash cards.
Because TLC is denser in …

Review
Patriot Memory’s latest Wildfire Sata 3 SSDs come with the promise of read and write speeds in excess of 500MB/s along with read and write IOPS in the 60K region. All of this blazing speed is available in 120GB (£240), 240GB (£420) and 480GB capacities – a 60GB version is in production, but not currently available in the UK. …

Toshiba has wrung another market slot-filling product out of its 5TB disk tech – a surveillance drive.
The company has two existing 5TB disk drive products. There is the MC04ACAnnnE bulk storage drive spinning at 7,200rpm for servers and arrays with cloud-scale needs. It has a 6Gbit/s SATA interface and an 800,000 hours MTBF …

Product Round-up
There may never be parity between SSDs and the good old mechanical HDD, but the solid state option is moving rapidly in the right direction regarding cost and capacity.
SSDs already lead the way in terms of resilience (they're far more durable than hard drives), power consumption (low), noise (lower still) and speed (high), …

Review
Following on from its impressive debut in last month’s SSD roundup, it seems in order to look further into Crucial’s M4 SSD, specifically the 256GB version of this Sata 3 capable device.
Crucial M4 Crucial's M4 really shows what SSDs can achieve thanks to its Sata 3 interfacing
First off, the usual; Crucial has made the M4 …

Serial ATA 3.0 is go, the Sata-IO industry body announced yesterday.
Sata 3.0 doubles the bus' current peak bandwidth to 6Gb/s, improves its power-conservation capabilities and upgrades the standard's Native Command Queuing (NCQ) technology to add streaming and better command management, all designed to make it easier to get …

A ZFS-based all-flash array? There's a thing to note in this block-focused all-flash array world. Europe-based Syneto has developed the product and it has updated its SMB-focused, ZFS-using Extreme 220 product.
The Extreme 220 is a 2U x 24 hot-swap slot box with from 2TB to 144TB of SATA or SAS SSDs. That means 6TB SSDs are used …

IDF
There's a burning need for a standard interconnect for netbook-oriented solid-state drives, apparently. Well, according to the Serial ATA International Organisation, the body behind the bus, there is.
To fill the gap, it has introduced mini-Sata - aka mSata. Regular Sata ports aren't exactly large, but they're clearly still too …

Product Round-up
It wasn’t that long ago that it would’ve been a struggle to put together a list of ten consumer SSDs. Now it's case of asking: only ten? Indeed, the rise of flash based storage in the last 18 months or so has been truly astounding.
Increased competition and cheaper NAND prices have combined to force prices well below the …

Apple may have switched to a slower SATA interface with some new MacBook Pros.
Apple had used SATA II for its MacBooks but appears to have reverted to the older and slower SATA I for some new MacBooks. The affected models are the 13in and 15in screen MacBook Pros. The 13in white MacBook and MacBook Air and the 17in MacBook Pros …

Flash is the new storage medium of choice and this has led to an explosion of interconnect options.
Magnetic disks are slow and not particularly latency sensitive; interconnects designed for them just don't cut it in a world where flash drives can be 10 times faster and are highly latency sensitive.
Let's take a quick look at …

Memory/flash chip maker Micron, fattened with Japanese DRAM firm Elpida, has recorded record revenues of $4.57bn.
Its first quarter of fiscal 2015 finished with a bang on December 4, 2014, delivering revenues 13 per cent higher than a year ago and eight per cent up on the fourth fiscal 2014 quarter.
Profits of a round billion …

Review
The Raspberry PI Model B+ is the hot new SBC (Single Board Computer) of the moment. The cheap price, low power usage, good support and ease of use make it a very good buy for DIY nerd projects and media front ends.
One common complaint is lack of RAM and CPU. Now, however, there are choices for Power users – the Banana PI from …

Toshiba has launched a 3TB small-form-factor hard drive, which must set some sort of record, surely.
Its MQ03ABB300 – what sexy names these suckers have – is a 2.5-inch disk drive with four platters each holding 750GB. That makes the drive 15mm thick (high in HDD parlance) and suitable for external drive use.
Tosh's latest …

The eagerly awaited new specification for hard-drive interconnects was released today, promising file-transfer speeds of up to six gigabits per second.
The cleverly acronymed Serial ATA International Organization - SATA-IO - on Wednesday announced that the SATA Revision 3.0 specification was officially ready for public …

Seagate and AMD have demonstrated a 6Gbit/s link between SATA disks and a server, double the speed of the current SATA 2 spec and the same as the fastest SAS speed.
The justification for the faster speed is to try and keep up with the accelerating growth in capacity - and cache capacity - of SATA disks, now at the 2TB level and …

SanDisk has revved its CloudSpeed SATA SSD line, adding a tad more random read speed, slowing down the random write speed and reducing the sequential read and write speeds a trifle, too.
These are business/enterprise SSDs in a 2.5-inch form factor product line that SanDisk acquired when it bought SMART Storage. There were then …

+Comment
Gamers are told to take note: SanDisk has souped its Extreme line of SATA interface consumer SSDs to the Extreme PRO – which has doubled capacity, slightly increased speed and an eye-catching 10-year warranty.
Last year's Extreme II featured a maximum of 480GB of capacity, random read/write speeds of 95,000/75,000 IOPS (4K), …

Toshiba has produced a 5TB 3.5-inch disk drive for bulk storage and cloud-based workloads, its second 5TB drive (the first came out in February).
The MC series drive seems to be based on its 5TB MG04 and shares the same 6Gbit/s SATA interface, 7,200rpm spin speed and 2TB, 3TB, 4BH and 5TB capacity points, using 1TB platters.
It …

Is it easy? Is is cheap? These are pretty much the only two questions which interest me when talking to a vendor these days – after years of worrying about technology.
Of course, if I was to produce an RFP document with simply those two questions, I’d probably be out of a job fairly swiftly.
But those two questions are not …

Toshiba has refreshed its HG5d 2.5-inch SSD with the sixth generation HG6 range, expanding its form factors to include the thinnest SSD module available – at just 2.3mm.
Toshiba next-generation high-performance client solid state HG6 series in multiple form factors...
The HG6 range, which has received THNSN and THNSF product …

Seagate is shipping an 8TB disk drive to selected OEM customers including object data-storing CleverSafe, with general availability next quarter. Tech details are sparse, however.
We know the data devouring beast fits in a standard 3.5-inch drive slot and has a 6Gbit/s SATA interface.
Seagate says it has “enterprise reliability …

LSI has doubled the amount of flash on its MegaRAID card to 1.6TB and quadrupled the number of ports to 16 so the mighty little beast can be used to accelerate servers in hyperscale environments.
The PCIe-connected Nytro MegaRAID cards combine a RAID controller with on-board flash and caching software to provide faster access to …

Toshiba has introduced SSDs using second-generation 19nm NAND tech to double the maximum capacity of one, and have a higher endurance rating on the other.
The HK3R2 is the second generation of the HK3R product technology, using the same basic 19nm MLC NAND but with a newer production process enabling a capacity increase to 960GB …

CES 2015
Samsung has used its 32-layer, 40nm V-NAND flash dies to produce its Portable SSD T1, a USB 3.0-connected drive for fast access to 250GB, 500GB or 1TB of flash capacity.
As you would expect with a USB interface, the performance is dreadfully slow compared with an internal drive using SATA (or SAS) interfaces.
Random read/write …

Review
The 256GB Crucial RealSSD C300 breaks new ground, as it is the first SSD to use a Sata 3.0 interface with its theoretical connection speed of 6GB/second. Alas, the use of Sata 3.0 interface on a conventional hard drive wasn’t so convincing, as revealed in Reg Hardware’s Seagate Barracuda XT review. In closing that piece, the …

Santa usually only visits well-behaved children, but this year he’s decided to drop in on the website of PC manufacturer Dell.
Dell_santa_sata_01 Sata - aka Santa - according to Dell
An eagle-eyed Register Hardware reader has discovered that the search term “SATA” will prompt Dell’s US website to ask customers “Did you mean …

Maxta has announced the launch of its MxSP, the first Cisco-certified hyper-converged system to run on UCS C-Series servers and support metro-distance clusters.
But how can a storage software company supply a hyperconverged server/storage/networking/software system when all it does is create the storage software component? …

Toshiba will put what it claims is the world's first 1.8in, SATA-connected 160GB hard drive into mass production in August.
The 8mm-thick HDD is accompanied by an 80GB version that's just 2g lighter than the 62g higher-capacity model.
Both drives spin at 5400rpm, up from th 4200rpm Toshiba's current top-of-the-line 1.8in drive …

Review
The Seagate Barracuda XT is the latest 2TB hard drive to land on our test bench, following on from the WD Caviar Black and Green and the Hitachi Ultrastar. It’s the largest capacity Seagate we have seen since the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 so you may think that Seagate was as keen as mustard to scatter review samples to the waiting …

Seagate has increased the capacity of its enterprise NAS drive, lengthened its warranty, and increased the NAS box slot count.
The existing Enterprise NAS drive holds up to 4TB, has a three-year warranty and is suitable for 1-5 bay NAS enclosures. The nice new one holds up to 6TB, has a five-year warranty, and is suitable for 1- …

LSI has finally brought the drawn-out development process for the next generation SandForce controller to a close. It now has third-generation controllers supporting four times bigger flash drives and both PCIe and SATA interfaces from a single ASIC. Bye-bye SAS.
LSI bought SandForce for its controllers two years ago. These …

Dispersed storage bods Cleversafe have accelerated their object storage access with a mix of faster processors, solid state storage, and memory caching in a new software release.
This report.
Its dsNet technology has Accesser 2100 and 3100 nodes handling object access requests with Slicestor nodes providing the object storage, …

Online backup bods Backblaze have found Seagate hard disks fail much more than other suppliers, although recent improvements have redressed the situation.
In a blog the Backblaze blogger Brian Beach says: “As of December 31, 2014, we had 41,213 disk drives spinning in our data centre, storing all of the data for our unlimited …

X86 CPU and Radeon graphics chipper AMD has come out with an SSD line using Toshiba/OCZ componentry.
It's called the Radeon R7-Series, which us a sideways extension of existing graphics processor branding. The SSD uses 19nm Toshibs MLC flash and has been designed, we understand, for balanced read and write workloads. The speeds …

An unearthed HP presentation session shows HP is envisaging cold data storage, archiving, using flash.
Here’s the TB4642 - Enabling the flash transformed data centre - session description extract;
What will soon further ramp the adoption of flash are the superior storage densities offered by solid state drives as they expand to …

Review
Here we are again. Another Intel chipset series sees the light of day – but at least this time there isn’t a new socket to contend with... Well, at the very high end there is, but that’s for the X99 Express coming later.
Intel 9 Series chipset overview
At launch there are two 9 series chipsets: the Z97 Express and the H97 …

Video
Youtube Video of the satellite footage of the planet Earth.
An experiment-filled Brit satellite has released a minute-long video of planet Earth – the first images of our home world captured by an entirely UK-built spacecraft.
The TechDemoSat-1, made by Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL), filmed the short sequence moments after …

SanDisk is on a revenue roll, with the first quarter of 2014 showing a 62 per cent profit rise on an annual compare, driven by rising enterprise SSD sales.
For the first three months of the year [prelim report PDF], to March 30, SanDisk revenues were $1.51bn; they were $1.34bn a year ago, meaning a 13 per cent uptick, although …

Lite-on will next month ship what it claims is the world's first 20x DVD writer with a SATA connection. The drive's aimed at the increasing number of motherboards that no longer support parallel ATA.
lite-on lh20a1s sata 20x dvd burner
The LH-20A1S can handle all the major DVD and CD recordable and rewriteable formats, …